The Taming of Red Butte Western eBook

So Judson stayed, and stumbled round the table, losing
his money and dribbling foolishness. Now faro
is a silent game, and more than once an angry voice
commanded the foolish one to choose his place and to
shut his mouth. But the ex-engineer seemed quite
incapable of doing either. Twice he made the
wavering circuit of the oval table, and when he finally
gripped an empty chair it was the one nearest to Rufford
on the right, and diagonally opposite to the dealer.

What followed seemed to have no connecting sequence
for the other players. Too restless to lose more
than one bet in the place he had chosen, Judson tried
to rise, tangled his feet in the chair, and fell down,
laughing uproariously. When he struggled to the
perpendicular again, after two or three ineffectual
attempts, he was fairly behind Rufford’s stool.

One man, who chanced to be looking, saw the “lookout”
start and stiffen rigidly in his place, staring straight
ahead into vacancy. A moment later the entire
circle of witnesses saw him take a revolver from the
holster on his hip and lay it upon the table, with
another from the breast pocket of his coat to keep
it company. Then his hands went quickly behind
him, and they all heard the click of the handcuffs.

The man in the sombrero and shirt-sleeves was first
to come alive.

“Duck, Bart!” he shouted, whipping a weapon
from its convenient shelf under the table’s
edge. But Judson, trained to the swift handling
of many mechanisms in the moment of respite before
a wreck or a derailment, was ready for him.

“Bart’s afraid he can’t duck without
dying,” he said grimly, screening himself behind
his captive. Then to the others, in the same unhasting
tone: “Some of you fellows just quiet Sammy
down till I get out of here with this peach of mine.
I’ve got the papers, and I know what I’m
doin’; if this thing I’m holdin’
against Bart’s back should happen to go off——­”

That ended it, so far as resistance was concerned.
Judson backed quickly out through the bar-room, drawing
his prisoner backward after him; and a moment later
Angels was properly electrified by the sight of Rufford,
the Red Desert terror, marching sullenly down to the
Crow’s Nest, with a fiery-headed little man
at his elbow, the little man swinging the weapon which
had been made to simulate the cold muzzle of the revolver
when he had pressed it into Rufford’s back at
the gaming-table.

It was nothing more formidable than a short, thick
“S"-wrench, of the kind used by locomotive engineers
in tightening the nuts of the piston-rod packing glands.

X

FLEMISTER AND OTHERS

The jocosely spectacular arrest of Barton Rufford,
with its appeal to the grim humor of the desert, was
responsible for a brief lull in the storm of antagonism
evoked by Lidgerwood’s attempt to bring order
out of the chaos reigning in his small kingdom.
For a time Angels was a-grin again, and while the
plaudits were chiefly for Judson, the figure of the
correctly clothed superintendent who was courageous
enough to appeal to the law, loomed large in the reflected
light of the red-headed engineer’s cool daring.